Evacuation of the Cenote Deep

The steel of Spain was marching high, a glinting, greedy wave, Across the shattered Inca realm, to plunder rock and cave. The Pizarro boys brought iron swords and standard, cross, and bell, But deep beneath the mountain roots, the ancient shadows fell. For months the Unseen Lithic lines had drawn the secret chart, Mapping out the water-ways through the Andes' stone-cold heart, Before the human miners came to blast the ceilings bare, And force the subterranean tribes to breathe the burning air. It fell upon the Yuletide week, the shortest, dimmest sun, When Spanish men-at-arms confessed the crimes that they had done. They feared the dark, they feared the wild, they held their rosaries tight, But nothing in their scripture told of what woke up that night. A clicking sound went through the rock—no human tongue could speak— The bio-radar marrow-pulse of tooth and massive cheek. The bat-line sent the final word, a leather-winged despair: The surface world is overrun. Retreat the lower stair.   The heavy-browed cartographers packed up the gypsum sheets, The vellum-stone of etched-out maps from hidden deep retreats. But as they reached the final fault, the Spanish vanguard pressed, With smoking guns and Toledo steel against a robust chest. The Warlord of the ULA let loose a final galdr, A heavy, foul, and yellow mist that smelled of rot and sulphur. It choked the narrow limestone throat with Hákarl's stinging breath, An ammoniacal, blinding fog that mimicked ancient death. The pheromones of Sjónhverfing turned sight to twisted dread; The Spaniards saw their comrades turn to monsters of the dead. They screamed of Hell, they dropped their pikes, they stumbled in the muck, As phantom giants, fierce and stone, inside their vision struck. By time the reeking vapor cleared beneath the mountain crest, The trolls had vanished through the seam, into the planet's breast. The Cenote routes were sealed in dark, the stone-skins safe below, Leaving a terrified, weeping host in the high Andean snow.